These Colleges Have Minted The Most Tech Executives

Though many of tech's most successful entrepreneurs are college
dropouts — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell, just to
name a few — a degree can goes long way when it comes to starting
a business.

Whether it's because of a strong business and engineering
curriculum or a helpful alumni network, some top universities
tend to produce more tech executives than others.

Princeton is a close second. According
to Bloomberg,
the Ivy League school is the country's top college for producing
CEOs of tech companies with market caps of more than $1
billion.

Eight Princeton grads have served as CEOs of major U.S.
tech companies, including Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, HP head Meg
Whitman, and former Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy. Google chairman Eric
Schmidt also attended Princeton, earning a bachelor's degree in
electrical engineering in 1976.

The University of California at Berkeley has
also minted some big tech success stories, thanks in part to its
proximity to Silicon Valley. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak is perhaps UC
Berkeley's most famous tech alum, but the school has also been
home to plenty of other successful entrepreneurs.

It's no surprise that Harvard fares well when it
comes to successful tech alumni, either. As one of the oldest and most selective
colleges in the country, and it has yielded a total of 7
billionaire tech CEOs, according
to Bloomberg.

Mark Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook in a Harvard dorm before
dropping out of school in 2004. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is
another famous Harvard dropout.

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, and
Sun Microsystems cofounder Scott McNealy all earned degrees from
Harvard before going on to make major contributions to the tech
industry.

Several other prestigious universities around the U.S. have also
minted their fair share of tech executives.

Though Ann Arbor is pretty far from Silicon Valley, the
University of Michigan has done well in this
regard.

Houston's Rice University, another school far
from Silicon Valley, has also had its fair share of successful
tech grads. According to Bloomberg, four Rice alumni have gone on
to lead tech companies worth more than $1 billion.

One of Rice's most notable grads is legendary Silicon Valley
investor John Doerr, who's
invested in Amazon, Google, Coursera, Flipboard, and Twitter,
among others.

Grads of the University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences have played
a significant role in
New York City's startup scene. Many of them were frat boys, too,
like Thrillist's Ben Lerer and TechStars' Dave
Tisch.

Two schools known for their engineering curricula stood out to
us: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Carnegie Mellon University.

According to Bloomberg, four former MIT students have gone on
to become CEOs of tech companies with market capitalizations of
more than $1 billion. Among the school's famous alumni are
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Qualcomm cofounder Irwin Jacobs, as
well as numerous Google executives.

And Cornell, which is in the process of opening a new
school for entrepreneurship and technology, has a healthy startup scene, having
served as the home base for Hotels.com founder David Litman, Palm
founder Jeff Hawkins, Wanelo
founder Deena Varshavskaya, and Priceline.com
founder Jay Walker.